“iRoom101”

By Dick Swart on 30 March 2010

The BBC had a really funny program called Room 101 in which an eloquent and witty celebrity could throw things, ideas or people they hate, into the so called room 101. The title comes from the Novel 1984 by George Orwell and was the torture room of the ministry of Love. The best Dutch equivalent of the phenomenon “room 101” you might say is “the round Archive”  which refers to a waist bin. The great Dutch TV actor and terrible show host Joost Prinsen tried it too, but alas. It was no success because Joost Prinsen didn’t get the notion that it is the task of the host to let the guest shine and not the other way around. Weirdly enough I’ve never seen the version with Erik van Muiswinkel and Jannes van der Wal.

I think it’s time to start our own room 101 with things idea’s or persons in the realm of Cross media. And of course it’s name will be www.iRoom101.org. It doesn’t exist yet so grab your chance, I’m to lazy. Let me be the first to throw in a few items.

The media is the message
Never in the history of media this quote has been understood by so few and abused by so many. And rightly so because although there may be some merit in the observation from Marshall Mcluhan it is usually misquoted, raped and abused for whatever purpose but mostly it is used by people who just want to sound media literate . The sentence just doesn’t make sense. It is a sentence like “The road is the car” or “The sewer is the turd”. The sentence just doesn’t make sense and that’s of course the reason why it is such a success. People can attribute everything to it and they do. Just ask 10 people in the field of media to explain what it means and I’m sure you get 10 contradicting explanations. If Mcluhan had only said “The media defines the message” than I would let it live but now it has to go.

The English word ‘content’ used in Dutch language
In 2001 I heard for the first time a sales manager say: “O ja, en we hebben iemand nodig voor het stukje content” (oh yea, and we need someone for the content-bit). I know you can’t ask an average sales manager to understand anything that isn’t defined in money or status but this one hit me hard. What ever happened with the good old Dutch word ‘Inhoud’? Why use the English word in stead? At first I thought that people who use ‘content’ when they mean ‘inhoud’ are just smug but there is more to it. There is an extra annotation (in the Dutch language) when people use ‘content’ When they use it the mean to say that it is easy to create, legal to steal and that it is not the essence of the product at hand. I think that the word content in the Dutch language is the sobriquet (scheldnaam, I had to Google it too) for the Dutch word ‘Inhoud’. “Content is King” but not in the Dutch language, there its a tyrant. So pull the handle and in with it.

Graphical emoticons
On September 19 1982 Scott Fahlmann, a computer scientist at the Carnegie Mellon University typed the first :-). A moment of pure brilliance in my view. A rare moment of lateral thinking. It gave me finally the possibility to express the fact that I mean something ironically with the just as subtle ;-) where the smiley winks his eye. I reckon I’ve saved several friendships over the past years with it (No, turn your head to the left and then you’ll see a little smiling man winking, so I didn’t mean to say that are a narrow minded tight ass. It was irony, idiot!). Thank you Scott, but what do stupid designers and programmers do? They screw up the hole witty essence of an emoticon by creating graphical ones. And Microsoft wouldn’t be Microsoft if they weren’t the ones to implement this disgrace into there software. Dump all of them and the designers too for being so oblivious of the original idea :p and :p once more

So, let me invite you to throw in your crappy irritating media phenomena in the virtual iRoom101 by posting a comment. Even if you want to throw in this blog.

tagged with: iroom, message, content, graphical emoticons, media

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